Christmas Island: An Anthropological Study By Simone Dennis

The fact that many Europeans are scattered in residential areas, like the magically named Silver City and the practically named Drumsite, and not just in the original European Settlement speaks to some of that community’s lamentation that their claim to locality is a lesser one than that made by Chinese and Malay communities. These latter communities can claim a generational continuance on the island that has called forth and been conducted in the presence of buildings at Poon Saan and the Kampong; however, it is not a generational continuance that has been merely handed down. The Chinese neighbourhood, for example, has been reproduced under difficult circumstances and has been reworked against the conditions of politics, national sentiments, and administrative requirements. Some members of the Chinese community can trace back the presences of their families for several generations. Some families living in the Kampong can trace their ancestries back to Malays, who were brought in to Christmas from Cocos Island as part of the first labour force on Christmas in the early to mid 1800s (see Quin, 2003).⁵ The Cocos Malays, as they are known, were also considered ‘native’ to the place by Australian locals partly resultant of the capacity of that community to continually produce an emplaced neighbourhood on the island under difficult conditions. All people who now live on Christmas Island who can trace their ancestries back any number of generations can only go as far as when the first migrants arrived; as migrants to a place terra nullius, Christmas Islanders have always had to make their neighbourhoods. Locals and/or natives are only locals and/or natives in and through complex combinations of staying on the island, being born on the island, and participating in the activities and sensual experiences that make someone local or native.

I consider it fruitful in the ethnographic case at hand to press into service those conceptualisations of localities and there-located local subjects posited by Appadurai (1995), for such insight allows us to immediately recognise the possibility that localities, including buildings and a sense of community, are the constant productions of hard work. In this view, local subjects are produced in and through the social acts of sensually embodying locality.